


our kind of striptease

by Welcoming_Disaster



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Early in Canon, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, M/M, Pining, Protective Steve Rogers, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:20:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28492272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welcoming_Disaster/pseuds/Welcoming_Disaster
Summary: Steve hates seeing Iron Man lose his armor, until he doesn't.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 8
Kudos: 135
Collections: 2020 Captain America/Iron Man Holiday Exchange





	our kind of striptease

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cap Iron Man Community](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Cap+Iron+Man+Community).



> this is set vaaaguely early canon with certain specific events (first drinking arc, molecule man identity reveal) referenced, but don't look too closely because it probably manages to contradict canon somehow 
> 
> written for prompt #40: "More and more villains try to disintegrate or compromise the armor to get to Tony. Steve is not amused." Hope you like it!

The first time it happens, they’re fighting the Melter. The team isn’t at full capacity; Steve has made it, as has Iron Man, the Wasp, and Giant-Man, but Thor is gone. He had given them a number, and they had given him an identicard, but since he’s not responsive on either, no way remains to contact him. They can only hope he’s alright — with the Melter aiming his rays towards Manhattan, they have bigger things to worry about. 

Caught up in the fray, Steve’s gut instinct is to worry for Jan. Just imagining her caught up in a blast of the Melter’s rays, her two-inch frame completely engulfed, makes his stomach turn. She’s too fast for him, though, flitting effortlessly out of range and throwing her tiny body against buttons and dials to shut off what she can. Giant-Man has taken on the task of trying to protect the buildings around them, using whatever makeshift shields he can find to block the rays’ way. 

But it’s Iron Man that the Melter is after, if he can’t get Tony Stark, and it’s Iron Man that he hits. Steve hears a faint yell, something that could be surprise or pain or both, and sees metal flowing like water down Iron Man’s arm, red mixing with silver and gold. He stumbles. 

He’s too far away; the Melter, Steve realizes, has deliberately driven him away from the team. Some hundred feet of broken earth and rubble separate Steve from Iron Man, and fear, white hot, shoots down his nerves. 

I can’t live without the suit, Iron Man had confided in him, once. It’s life support. Steve doesn’t want to find out what that means. 

The Melter is precise about it, neatly melting off all of the armor which covers Iron Man’s left leg.

“Enough!” Steve screams, stopping his desperate scramble towards his friend to throw his shield hard at the Melter. At the same time, Janet finally hits the right button, and the rays shut off. 

Giant-Man is already grabbing the Melter in one huge hand, which leaves Steve finally free to rush to Iron Man’s side. 

Iron Man has fallen down heavily on his side, his gauntleted hand clasped to the side of his chestplate. Melted drops of metal are fusing to his skin, leaving burns of all degrees around the areas where the armor is damaged. Steve kneels down by him, and traitorously, realizes he’ll never forget the color of skin. He’d assumed Iron Man was white from the blue eyes peering out from behind the mask, but he hadn’t known for certain, hadn’t been able to imagine the expanse of evenly tanned, exposed skin now on display. 

“Shellhead?” He asks, keeping his voice even. “Status?” 

“I’m alright,” Iron Man’s voice is strained with pain, obvious even with the vocal filters on the suit, “I’m alright, this won’t— my heart’s gonna be fine.” 

So it’s his heart. It’s his heart that’s tied to the suit, to the life support. Steve shouldn’t be making a note of this, shouldn’t be looking for clues right now, when his friend is in peril. 

“It’s my leg, where the metal’s digging in, ” Iron Man tells him, snapping his attention back to reality, “nothing too bad, but I’m gonna be honest, hurts like a—“ 

He glances up at the sky, and holds back on telling Steve what it hurts like. 

“Here,” Steve says, “let me see.”

He traces his fingers along the singed edge of the metal, hitting the place where the sharp, jagged line had cut into Iron Man’s flesh, and— 

“This might backfire,” he warns. He can’t tell if Iron Man’s little inhale is fearful or relieved.

His hand is gloved, covered, but the metal is still burning hot underneath it as he takes hold of it and bends it back, away from his friend’s skin. 

“Oh,” Iron Man says, immediately, “that’s better.” 

“They’ve got the Melter,” Steve tells him unnecessarily, setting his hand down. The motion comes naturally to him, easily, and he doesn’t realize until he's done it that he has put his hand on Iron Man’s bare thigh. 

His skin is warm — of course it is, considering how singed he’d been just now— and smooth under Steve’s glove. The intimacy of it, the feeling of touching Iron Man under the armor, is almost too much to bear. 

Iron Man’s metal-covered hand comes to rest gently over Steve’s, metal on leather. He probably wants support, Steve reflects. He’d probably been scared. Still, something about the touch makes him think of all the layers of separation between them. He feels like a man catching a glimpse of ankle under layers and layers of old-fashioned skirts, everything else left to the imagination. 

Iron Man clears his throat, his fingers brushing lightly over Steve’s knuckles. He doesn’t have any more to say than Steve.

And then the team joins them, and Steve helps Iron Man back to his feet and into the helicopter, where he goes at his burned legs with the first aid kit. The spell of the moment they’d shared is broken. 

The scene doesn’t leave his dreams, though. 

Sometimes, after that incident, Steve has nightmares of Iron Man being torn out of the armor, scraped out like a clam out of its shell, always starting with the legs, long and tan, and too mangled by the end for Steve to make out his face. As much as they unsettle him, he accepts those dreams as a workplace hazard, a natural consequence of his line of work.

It’s the other kind of dream that’s more dangerous, the pleasant kind. Sometimes, he dreams of sitting with his hand — not gloved, this time, but bare, skin to skin — once more on Iron Man’s thigh — unhurt, this time, no bruises or cuts or burns,— of his fingers tracing over smooth, tanned, skin, working up until perhaps— until— 

He always wakes up then, and this is for the best. 

The second time it happens, Amora the Enchantress has come after Thor, who has cheerfully returned to the team. When he’d proven elusive, she had captured the unlucky Avengers who’d been leaving the gym together that morning — Steve, Iron Man, and an annoyed, freshly-minted Hawkeye— as bait. 

The three of them are bound with some kind of magic, fern-like rope, suspended from the ceiling of her lair. Clint, who had just informed them he can untie any knot, struggles impotently to try to prove his words right, his fingers seemingly unable to find hold. Steve’s quiet for the time being, strategizing. 

Iron Man fires a repulsor blast upwards, nearly freeing himself, and Amora pouts girlishly at him and yanks off his gauntlets entirely. 

She doesn’t go any further. Her interest isn’t in Iron Man at all; he’d been frustrating her, and she’d dealt with the issue. That’s all this is. 

Still, for a moment, Steve feels the what if coiling in the pit of his stomach. 

The ropes adjust themselves to coil around Iron Man’s hands, which are as tan as his legs had been. Steve’s serum-sharp eyes pick up on faint little calluses on his palms, the manicured shine of his nails. The first fact aligns with his inner conception of Iron Man. The second does not. 

At the same time, he feels a sharp sense of fear grip him. 

Anything can get into the suit now. Iron Man, normally sealed off from the world securely, is just a touch more vulnerable. 

He longs to see Iron Man without the armor, but a deep sense of wrong overtakes him when any part of it is missing. 

Twenty minutes later, when Thor, along with the rest of the team, comes to their aid, the gauntlets are restored to their rightful owner. Steve feels an intense, overwhelming surge of relief. 

His nightmares gain a new feature, another layer of reality. 

Soon after comes the fateful meeting with Molecule Man. As Steve takes in Tony Stark’s outstretched, tan legs, faintly scarred around the knees, his calloused, manicured hands — hands he’s seen hundreds of times before — the only possible conclusion hits him. 

“Tony Stark…” He says, falling back on formality, “you’re—?”

Iron Man. 

He tries to tell Tony to hide, to stay put while he fights Molecule Man. He thinks Tony takes some offense to this, but he would have said this no matter who he’d found under the armor.

He doesn’t like Iron Man vulnerable. He doesn’t like Iron Man without the iron protecting him.

But he insists on coming along, on fighting. They get out alive, mostly unhurt. Steve watches as Tony dons the armor once more, gaining its sturdy protection and three inches in height.

“I’d thought you were taller than me,” he says, for lack of anything else to say. Oddly, when he closes his eyes, he still pictures Iron Man as faceless and tanned, with callouses and well-manicured nails. Tony is hard to add into the picture. 

“Yeah,” Tony Stark’s whiskey warm laugh is audible, now, in the robotic noise of Iron Man’s laughter, warped by his mask’s vocal filters, “you know what, keep thinking that.” 

“Not a chance, Shellhead,” Steve bumps shoulder against Tony’s, and the awkwardness is mostly gone. On the return trip home, he pours over the new information in his head, adjusting it for new facts. A lot of things suddenly make sense. 

After they debrief, he turns to go, but Iron Man — Tony — stops him with a metal-clad hand on the shoulder. 

“Hang back for a bit, Cap,” he asks, the casual tone of his voice clearly faked.

He doesn’t ask Tigra, who’d also witnessed the reveal, to hang around. Steve’s not surprised. The two of them are close, after all. 

Avengers file out of the room one by one, and Iron Man shuts the door, takes a long inhale that rattles through his mouth piece, and pulls off his helmet. Tony Stark’s pale blue eyes look Steve up and down. Anxiety is written into every line of his face. 

Steve just stares, his brain trying to make sense of Iron Man with helmet off. It shouldn’t feel as intimate as it does. 

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” he says, though it hardly needs saying.

“I know.” Tony replies. “Will it change things between us?” 

Steve takes a moment to consider the question. It will, definitely, in some ways; it’ll be impossible to continue thinking of Iron Man the same way as he had before, of Tony Stark the same as he had before. Of course things will change. 

“Not in the ways that matter,” he says, after a moment, “you’re still my best friend.” 

Tony stares down at the floor, considering his words carefully, and settles on, “I’ve seen you trying to figure me out. Looking.” 

“Yeah,” Steve says, his own voice low, guilty, “I’m sorry.” 

“No, no,” Tony says, too quickly, “just hope the grand reveal didn’t disappoint.” 

“You’re a very good looking fella, if that’s what you mean,” Steve says, mostly joking, and Tony takes the easy out and laughs a little too loud. 

“Aw, shut it,” he says, but Steve thinks he’s pleased. 

It leaves a warm feeling in his core, feeling that he’d pleased Tony.

Steve lays awake, that night, and thinks of pulling off the armor piece by piece, revealing more and more tanned skin. He hadn’t had the chance to think about it, too overwhelmed with other revelations, but he realizes now he’s seen it all. He knows exactly what would await him, can bring to mind Tony’s scarred chest and faint six-pack, his muscled thighs, the sharp jut of his hipbones. Thanks to Molecule Man, he’s had the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing it all. 

He gets the chance again and again, now that he knows what to look for. Tony is busy, but he isn’t a recluse; he attends pool parties, stretching sleepily on lounge chairs, growing tanner and tanner in the sun; takes Steve up on his offers of tennis in the courtyard; drapes himself over chairs in the common room, his dress shirts hiking up to reveal a flash of hip here or there. Now that Steve is looking, it’s all there. 

This, he realizes, turns the mix of worry and illicit excitement he’d felt seeing Iron Man lose pieces of his armor into nothing but worry. 

Two months after his revelation, he receives a distress call from Iron Man’s identicard. 

It’s a quick message: Meet me @ mansion ASAP, need assist, and Steve isn’t overly worried until he realizes that he and Thor — the two people aware of Iron Man’s identity — were the only two people called. It could be nothing, of course; it’s possible there’s been some minor accident in the lab he’d like to be quietly helped with, or something of the sort. There are plenty of reasons, Steve tells himself, for the distress call.

As a child, he’d played once with a wooden toy soldier that banged on a drum if you wound him up. He remembers the feeling of overwinding the thing, feeling the potential energy pushing against the little lever the moment before he let go. Now, in the driveway of the mansion, his shield down at his side, he feels like the little soldier, overwound and ready to leap into action, every muscle in his body wooden stiff with anticipation. 

The door to the mansion is slightly ajar. On the doorstep lies Iron Man’s red gauntlet, bereft of the whole and instinctually wrong like a severed limb. His identicard, the same one he’d used to send the message, lays discarded on the floor by it. 

Steve stomach drops a degree further.

A trail of red and gold has been left out, pieces of the armor. It's a grotesque recreation of someone shedding his clothes, of a couple, perhaps, tossing their garments on the floor as they stumble towards the bedroom. 

It leads him down to the lab, and he recognizes Madame Masque’s silhouette from behind. 

She has Tony strapped down to his own lab table. Steve’s shield catches her mid-speech, which, he’s sure, must have touched on the irony of it all. Physician, heal thyself, and all. 

Tony glances up at him, at a little weary, perhaps drunk, as he enters the room, but gives a little shrug and a what can you do kind of smile as they make eye contact. 

She throws his shield back at him and fires her gun. They dance around each other for a while, each parrying hits, until Tony frees his own hands and gets to one of his spare gauntlets and Madame Masque scampers out the window like a disgruntled cat. 

It’s hardly a daring rescue; Steve has the feeling that their threat du jour had not actually been intending to do real harm, that she’d been after the brief power play of trapping Tony and perhaps the satisfaction of going hand in hand against anyone who’d show up to rescue him. Why else trap him in his own home, make it painfully obvious exactly where to go, toss Steve his shield before shooting at him? 

“She was just after attention,” Steve observes, gesturing all around them. 

“Well, exes,” Tony says vaguely, catching himself against the table he’d been strapped to, “you know how it is.” 

Definitely a little drunk, Steve thinks. She must have caught him with his guard down.

“She took you out of your suit,” He points out aloud, “I found pieces all down the hallway.” 

“Well, exes,” Tony repeats, “you know how it is.” 

“It scared me,” Steve admits. He’s come up to Tony, now, feeling down his sides, “to see all that. Are you alright? Not drugged, are you? Drunk?” 

Tony shakes his head, “No, I— oh, I didn’t tell you. I haven’t been drinking. Regular old sleep deprivation. Banged my head a little on the way down.” 

That’s an interesting turn of events, Tony not drinking. Steve had suspected a problem, one he’d never been sure how to bring up based on the scant evidence available. He just nods, accepting the information like it’s normal. 

His hand is still on Tony’s ribs. 

“Should get you checked out.” He says. “Med.” 

“You were  _ worried _ , worried,” Tony observes, his chin tilted up towards Steve. He’s not much shorter than him when they both stand up straight, but standing half-leaning against the counter like this, his eyes are level with Steve’s chin. 

Steve wants to put his hand on the side of his jaw and draw up him up until— 

“Don’t like you out of the suit,” Steve says, cutting off his own dangerous thoughts, “I get scared.” 

“Oh.” Tony says. His eyes linger on Steve’s lower lip. “I’d best put it back on, then.” 

Steve’s neck burns, and he glances down at the floor, away from Tony. “Don’t like other people taking you out of the suit,” he amends, “it happens too often.” 

“Signature weakness, as much as it makes a man feel like an anime girl.” Tony shrugs. His tone is a strange blend, the sure notes of a man who knows what he wants fading into a sort of breathy uncertainty. “Though if you wanted to be the one to do it…” 

He cuts himself off, apparently feeling, too, that they’d ventured into dangerous territory. 

“What?” Steve asks. 

Tony’s hand comes up, lightly, to cover Steve’s where it rests on his side, “Well, you’d just have to ask.” 

“Yeah,” Steve says, “alright. I’m asking.” 

**Author's Note:**

> big thank you to my girlfriend for her super helpful beta suggestions on this one ily


End file.
